Correctional Stay
by payroo
Summary: Anita is an ex-criminal from the mean streets of Mineral City mistakenly assigned to farm in Zephyr Town as community service for her parole. She plans to maximize her profit before the mistake's realized, but plans have a nasty knack of changing...
1. An Ultimatum

It was community service or four years.

I took one look through the brochures, all grinning kids in wheelchairs painting sunshine and rainbows over graffiti-covered walls, and pushed them back across the hole in the glass. I'd do my time, I told them. I'd rather die than put up with that crap.

Then I was transferred to Mineral City Women's Correctional Facility.

After a few months, I was _begging _for the mural brushes and paint.

And so it was that I found myself on a one-way bus to some little shithole of a town out in the country. Apparently, the place had some kind of farmer's market that had seen better days. Not that that sort of crap mattered to me in the first place – I wasn't exactly the kind of yuppie material that fretted about buying organic and local. I was just an inmate ready to do her time on the prison farm.

I knew something was off when the mayor welcomed me with open arms.

"You must be Anita," he laughed. Either he was a better actor than any of the stiffs on the big screen or something was horribly wrong (for the warden, more than right for me) here. "Welcome to Zephyr Town. Our town has been in dire need of a farmer for some time."

What I found out (and the warden didn't know) was that this _wasn't_ a prison farm. There had been some kind of communication snafu (unsurprising really, given that the only way the warden communicated with this bumpkin mayor was via snail mail). The DA was under the impression that I was going to be working two years of hard labor under close supervision; the mayor thought I was here as some sort of professional independent farmer.

In fact, I wasn't even going to be working for anybody. This farm – all two acres of it – was to be _mine_. I couldn't help but grin until my jaw felt like it was about to fall off (or that could have been the effects of last week's fistfight. You never could know with these things). I could just imagine how pissed the DA would be once he found out I received prime real estate in place of a sentence. There was some good money to be made out of this, I was sure.

So I shook the mayor's hand, courteously bit back my smart remarks about the suit that made him look like a tripped out leprechaun, and graciously accepted the farming implements given me. This was perfect, really perfect. I was sure I could dust up a tidy profit out of this place in the two years I was to be on probation. I would keep a low profile, wouldn't make any trouble (not that there would be much trouble to make in this sorry backcountry). And after two years, I'd have saved up enough for my ticket out of here and back into the big city.

With the plan in mind, I didn't lose any sleep that night after the mayor finished giving the grand tour of the place (which took all of half an hour - I wondered if the whole town had as many people as the block I used to operate on).

Funny, you would have figured that after three months in correctional, I'd have realized my plans didn't have a habit of working out in the long run.


	2. A Dossier and a Change of Plans

On the billboards for Mineral County Dairy, farming looks positively cute. You have your standard burly, apple-cheeked farmer, donning a wide-brimmed hat, standing next to a cutesy wife and kids who are playing with an absurdly happy cow. It looks like something out of a flipping fairy tale.

What I learned in the first week of my sojourn in Zephyr Town was that that was all utter bullcrap.

Sure, I considered myself relatively in shape (a life of crime in Mineral City tends to do that for you), but I wasn't prepared for the utter and complete _exhaustion_ that comes from plowing a half-acre field by hand, or manually watering rows of crops. You'd think even the backcountry would have irrigation by now. I was starting to think that I was denied this most basic of technology as part of my sentence. They do that kind of shit to mess with your head – make you run treadmills that don't grind anything, make you walk around in circles carrying bricks. I started to doubt that there had ever been a communication error, started to wonder if the mayor did in fact know my story and was responsible for carrying out my sentence.

Actually, I didn't have much time to worry about all that. By the time the sun set, I all but collapsed into bed, still sweating even after I had taken a bath in the old-fashioned wooden tub in the admittedly comfortable house I had to live in. Have you ever been so tired it hurts just to _think_? Even falling asleep feels like too much effort to make.

The locals were all real friendly-like. Too friendly for my taste, really. I was sure I smelled a rat. Maybe they were all in on my parole, watching me for any signs of slipping. Fueled by old habits and paranoia, I committed all their names and faces to my memory. I even went so far as to keep a little dossier of their basic info and schedules.

Hey, I didn't survive Mineral City for most of my adult life for nothing. It pays to be cautious. I had to be sure none of the locals were keeping tabs on me. But either my suspicions were unfounded or they were too good for me to catch. In any case, I started trying to get into the good graces of them all, see where I might be able to pull a few favors in the future.

I didn't think the mayor would be a problem; he was all brawn and no brain. Back in Mineral City he'd be the kind of guy who stood behind someone else in a nice tux and a pair of brass knuckles. But out here someone had plunked a top hat on him and so he was in charge. I just nodded and smiled at him, played the part of professional independent farmer expected of me. I felt obligated to give the guy a share of my crop – it wasn't quite extortion (he had never asked for any of it) but he never refused it either. I figured I was probably buying his silence. His daughter seemed a little sharper than him, but she was soft – she wouldn't last two days in the neighborhood I grew up in.

The housewife-types took to me well enough. I can play up the whole "graduate of the hard knock school of life with a heart of gold" shtick well enough if I have to, and they enjoyed fussing over me. A few gifts of the flowers I picked up on the side of the road and they were won over to my side as far as I could tell. Through them I gained an acquaintance with their husbands, both hard-working sorts who fiddled with the windmills on the edge of town all day (I couldn't help but wonder if they'd have been garage mechanics back in Mineral City), and their snot-nosed brats, who I guess could be kind of cute when they weren't covered in mud and bugs.

Through my daily business transactions I got to meet Raul. The first time I went to his shop I wasn't expecting to be able to sell stuff. What was the guy, some sort of fence? I could unload all kinds of crap onto him, no questions asked, and get good hard G's on the spot. I figured he must be connected to the DA somehow. Maybe he was working undercover and just _waiting_ for me to slip up and slip him something that I shouldn't. Well, I was determined to beat them at their own game. The only weed I sold him was the kind I pulled off of my turnips.

As I frequently stopped by Raul's shop to sell the various knicks and knacks I picked up around town, I had the misfortune of getting to know Lloyd. Guy had a stick up his ass longer than the branches I lugged in here to sell to Raul as scrap plywood. Oh sure, I was certain he was some kind of softie once you got to know him and peeled off his frosty layers, but to be frank, I couldn't be bothered. I wasn't in this town to make friends; I was here to make money, and he was preaching to the choir when he lectured me with his sanctimonious work ethic. I didn't give a shit about the welfare of the community, but he could rest assured that if my making as much money as humanly possible would help Zephyr Town, then I might as well be the town savior. I told him as much in so many words, minus the little part about my self-furthering motivations. I'm not sure he was completely convinced by my good Samaritan act, or if his disbelief came out of his conviction that I was an incompetent, lazy layabout. In any case, I decided he was one to keep an eye on.

There were some old folks that I made a minimal effort to socialize with – just enough so that they could vouch for my character if the need ever arose (not that I was planning to let that happen, but it pays to play it safe) but not enough that they'd start writing me into their wills. Joan down at the café and the old couple up at the hotel were welcoming enough. Anyways, they seemed to be busy with their businesses and wouldn't have a lot of time to snoop around town. The girls who worked for their establishments were pretty much what you'd expect as girl-next-door material, and the kid who worked as a waiter in the café seemed an empty-brained happy-go-lucky sort. I wrote their names down at the bottom of my threat list.

Ah, who else was there? There were few enough people so that I would be able to keep track of them all, but they were many enough that it'd drive me crazy doing so. I had shoved my dossier into my account book for the farm, so that if I was ever searched it wouldn't be so painfully obvious that I was a paranoid bitch.

Claude and Freya went into the city (or what counted as a city out here) a lot. Professional types. They might have posed a bigger risk to me if they were around more, but I figured that with all the more pressing troubles on my mind, it was safe to write them off for the moment. But Claude's kid really put me on edge. There was just something off about her, how suspicious and standoffish she was and how she was always sneaking around real quiet-like. I got the hairy feeling that I was being watched more than once.

Oh, the café waiter's older brother went into the city a lot too, but I got the feeling he was somewhat more integrated in the town. Through some careful questioning, I figured out that Ivan worked as a teacher in the city, but also did some tutoring of the kids here in Zephyr Town. I wasn't sure what to make of the guy. He was nice enough, like all the people out here, but he had this air like he was hiding something, like he knew something you didn't. Yet another one to watch out for, I guessed.

The last person on my dossier was there for an entirely different reason.

Going into the painter Angelo's house was a real shocker. The guy had invited me in as part of the old welcome tour wherein the whole town had me over for a meal or two. I realized I recognized some of the paintings hanging on the wall, and they weren't shoddy duplicates either. They were the real thing.

"Did you paint these?" I tried to keep myself casual. "I think I've seen them somewhere in a gallery before." Which begged the question of why they were now hanging in what was presumably the artist's own home.

"Ah, I made these a few years ago," he answered, looking pleased at the recognition. I doubted any of the residents of this town knew what they had in this guy. "A few of them went on exhibition in Mineral City a while ago, but the ones here are the ones I couldn't bear to part with."

"Wow, they're really something," I peered closer at the brushwork. If my memory served me correctly, even the smallest of the ones in the series had been going for a cool couple grand or so. And the collectors couldn't get enough of the kid's work – they were real upset that so many of the works weren't even on sale.

Of course, my criminal mind was already trying to figure how much one of these big ones could go for. Hey, I couldn't help it. My main racket had been the black-market art trade, after all. Illegal dealership was an interesting place to be in – the highest of society mixed with the lowest, and for once we had something that the higher-ups wanted.

This kid Angelo changed everything, threw a real wrench in my plans. Forget waiting out the two years of my parole working in the fields – I'd just get into Angelo's good graces enough so that I could nab a couple of these paintings and make a run for it.


End file.
